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Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Henrique had his first NHL fight in the first period of tonight’s 6-3 loss in Calgary and also his first Gordie Howe hat trick as he also had a goal and an assist.

Henrique’s fight came against Flames captain Jarome Iginla 13:53 into the first period. With the Devils trailing 3-0, Henrique knocked down Iginla with a clean, shoulder hit in the bottom of the right circle in the New Jersey zone.

“It was a clean hit,” Henrique said.

Calgary’s Curtis Glencross didn’t like it, though, and challenged Henrique, who admitted he didn’t have any interest in fighting him. When Iginla got up and indicated he wanted to fight, Henrique, 21, figure that would be a good exchange for the Devils, so he dropped the gloves.

“First professional fight,” said Henrique, who had no fights in Albany last season. “Obviously he’s an unbelievable player and he’s a tough guy. You’ve got to stick up for yourself, so I figured I’d rather take him off for five minutes than Glencross there."

Henrique did well to hang in against Iginla and the linesmen stepped in before Iginla, who now has 59 fighting majors to his credit, did any real damage. Henrique was “surprised” to be challenged after his hit.

“I guess there’s that fine line between clean hit and dirty hit,” he said. “I caught him in a vulnerable spot, but he came over and at that time of the game we needed to turn things around and I figured it was a pretty good trade off to take him off for five (minutes). We ended up with a power play out of it.”

“He’s trying to give us a spark too like everybody else,” DeBoer said of Henrique. “I thought it was a good hit, a good play.”

Henrique would pick up an assist on Ilya Kovalchuk’s goal that cut the Flames’ lead to 4-1 with 5:12 left in the second period and then scored on a shorthanded 2-on-1 with Zach Parise – the Devils’ league-leading 10th shorthanded goal of the season – to make it 5-2 with 2:36 left in the second to complete his Gordie Howe hat trick. (Iginla also had a Gordie Howe hat trick.)

“We were flat in the first,” Henrique said. “I thought we came out in the first couple of minutes and then they turned it around. We made mistakes, myself included on the third goal.”

With his two points tonight, Henrique raised his season total to 34 and is just one behind Edmonton’s Ryan Nugent-Hopkins for the NHL’s rookie lead. Nugent-Hopkins is out for three to four weeks with a separated left shoulder and won’t play in Wednesday night’s game against the Devils.

About

TOM GULITTI has covered the New Jersey Devils for The Record since 2002. Prior to that, he covered the New York Rangers for four years. Gulitti joined The Record in 1998 after six years at The North Jersey Herald News. He graduated from Binghamton University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric-Literature.